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One of Nature’s Mysteries to Solve

Mystery time again. It’s spring and we squirrels are finding bits of broken shell under the trees. Which bird do you think hatched from this one?

Note! More than one species of bird has blue eggs!

Back later for your guesses.

~~~

Egg identification is hard! It’s a blue egg, and most people think robins when they see blue eggs. But after Nutmeg and I did some research, we learned the eggs of the American Robin are a darker blue, and only blue, not speckled. But robins are in the Thrush family, and all the Thrushes seem to have blue eggs.

Bluebirds, we thought! Hmm, no, their eggs are well photographed, smaller than robin eggs and blue. By clicking around, we found some other photos of blue speckled eggs, like this one from Sitka, Alaska! And this Song Thrush egg. A Hermit Thrush? That photo shows some speckling, but this one has none. Go figure!

Clearly bird eggs vary a lot.

We have to hang up our detective hats and admit we aren’t positively sure. Another look at Song Thrush eggs seems like the closest we are going to get. We wonder, do the eggs get lighter or darker in color after the birds hatch out of them? (No birds let us squirrels get close enough to check.) Do the colors vary depending on what part of the country the birds nest in? What foods they eat? If you humans have better detective skills, please chime in with answers.

Lastly, here is a neat set of eggs we found in a blog post, with all of them identified.